“If it wasn’t you at the house, then who was it?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she lied. Her shoulders had tensed up so much her T-shirt looked as if it were on a hanger.
“Try again,” I said.
She started walking away. “I need to sit down.”
That was a good sign. People always sit for confession.
Paulina’s living room looked like a page out of the Restoration Hardware catalogue. There were big pillows on top of giant sofas, set off by a huge glass coffee table with assorted knickknacks arranged just so.
She sat. We all sat. Elizabeth and I said nothing. We only stared, waiting her out. Eventually Paulina started talking.
“I was supposed to be with Carter last Tuesday,” she said.
“What happened?” I asked.
“He canceled. Or at least I thought he did,” she said. “I got a text about two hours beforehand.” She beat us to the punch. “And, yes, I saved it.”
She reached for her cell in her sweatpants, bringing up the text. We knew she wasn’t about to hand over her phone, so Elizabeth and I got up to read it.
Betty it’s C. Friend’s
phone. Dropped smine,
shattered. Gotta get new
asap so need to cancel
today. Cool?
“Wait. Who’s Betty?” I asked, reading the text again.
“That’s the name I use with him,” she said. “I’m Betty.”
“Does he know your real name?” asked Elizabeth.
“It’s funny, every repeat client wants to know my real name at some point. They think it makes them different, like we have a real connection or something. Carter never asked me. Not once,” she said.
“Had he ever canceled on you before?” I asked.
She smiled slightly, as if I’d hit on something. “Never.”
I sat down again, but Elizabeth remained standing. She was pacing. She was hooked. “The excuse about his phone breaking sure made it convenient for someone else to have sent that text,” she said.
“Yes, but someone who also had to know who Betty was,” I said. I pointed at Paulina. “As well as your cell number and when you saw Carter each week.”
“That was another thing,” said Paulina. “Something else that had me thinking he actually did send the text. Carter never used his name. It was always just C when he texted me. Apparently a lot of the kids on campus call him C Money.”
“Subtle,” said Elizabeth.
“So maybe Carter sent the text, maybe he didn’t,” I said. “The question is, what did you do about it?”
“What do you mean?” asked Paulina.
“He canceled. Or at least I thought he did,” I said, repeating back what she’d first told us. “That means you had to have done something about it. You followed up in some way.”
Again, Elizabeth and I just stared at Paulina. “I drove out to Darien,” she said finally.
“I get it,” said Elizabeth. “You were suspicious. You thought maybe you were losing a good client.”
“Exactly,” she said.
“And?” asked Elizabeth.
“And I saw his BMW in the driveway when I got there. So I parked a little down the street from the house and waited. Then I saw her,” she said. “She pulled up in a red Jaguar, got out, and went inside.”
“Then what?” I asked.
Paulina shrugged. “Then I went home. What was I supposed to do? I mean, I thought about waiting and confronting him afterward, but that’s something a girlfriend would do. I wasn’t his girlfriend.”
“Did you at least get a good look at the other woman?” asked Elizabeth.
“She was tall. Long hair. Light brown, I think. Maybe not so light, I don’t know. That’s about it,” she said. “Oh, and she was wearing a black fur coat.”
“Any chance she works for the same person you work for?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t know.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know who I work for,” she said.
Paulina—Betty, to Carter—was so matter-of-fact about it that I didn’t immediately react the way I was supposed to react. Utter disbelief. She doesn’t know who she works for?
“But even if I did know, I’d never tell you,” she continued. “You could arrest me, try to lock me up forever. I still wouldn’t tell you.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because they’d kill me, that’s why.”